1. Technical Field
The invention relates to product needs assessment. More particularly, the invention relates to a tool that assists company representatives in configuring a product to meet a customer's needs.
2. Description of the Prior Art
The pace of product and service development is such that it is often difficult for sales and marketing personnel to keep their customer's abreast of current company product offerings, configurations, options, and pricing. Old style print catalogs are typically out of date before they leave the printer, and CD-ROM catalog updates fare no better (this includes such update services as Charles Schwab's "Street Smart").
Further complicating the job of field sales personnel is the need to match the product configuration to the customer's unique needs. For example, in the computer networking industry, e.g. with regard to the sale and installation of an intranet, non-traditional factors such as company policy, security requirements, and acceptable bandwidth, as well as more typical factors such as physical plant and number of workstations, must be taken into account when preparing a proposal for a customer network configuration.
One approach to assisting field personnel and company customer's in assessing and fulfilling customer product needs has been to provide scripted scenarios. Such scenarios, for example as provided by Netscape Communications, Inc. (i.e. "smartpage"), pose a series of questions, the answer to which instructs the field personnel/customer with regard to the most appropriate product. This approach, however, is static and limited to specific "canned" examples.
It would be advantageous to provide an intelligent sales tool that provides field personnel/customers with access to current product information while guiding them through the needs assessment and product selection/configuration process.